


Those Golden Dreams

by cmk418



Category: Justified
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 12:24:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17508590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmk418/pseuds/cmk418
Summary: Johnny's always had a thing for Ava





	Those Golden Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in 2012 during Season Three when Johnny makes his interest in Ava known. 
> 
> Title comes from Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love"

“C’mon, Givens, you’re up,” Johnny yells from the mound. He sees Raylan talking to someone, a skinny blonde girl with long legs, who looked barely old enough to be out of grade school. She follows Raylan to the batting case, staying outside as he steps in to face Johnny.

“Come on, Raylan. Hit one outta here!” yells the girl.

“Nice cheerleading section you got there. Never thought of you as a chicken hawk.” Johnny’s first pitch zips past the batter, who glares at him. “Strike one.”

“She’s my neighbor.”

“You don’t say. I wonder how much you’ve been following the teachings of the Bible where it says…”

“Why don’t you just-?”

“Strike two.”

“It’s okay, Raylan, you’ll get hold of the next one,” called the girl.

“So faithful. You’ll have to tell her I’m sorry for breaking her heart.” Johnny throws the next one so fast that Raylan is still completing his swing by the time the ball bounces off the cage in front of the blonde.

As he walks in from the mound, he hears Raylan mutter, “Sorry, Ava.”

The next inning, he notices Ava’s eyes on him and he smiles.

 

The night everything changes, he’s sitting at a picnic table out back at Uncle Bo’s house, drinking a beer and listening to the old men tell stories. Boyd sidles up on the bench next to him. “You’ll never believe who’s here.”

“Who?”

“Ava.”

“My Ava?” The words slip out before he can stop them and Johnny winces. Boyd will definitely get some mileage out of that.

“Just for your own health, cousin, I’m gonna forget you said that. She’s with Bowman.”

Johnny nods and takes another gulp of his beer. He watches as all the Crowder men turn when the girl of his dreams strolls through the door in her yellow mini-dress, looking like a ray of sunshine.

 

The night before the wedding, he dreams of her. She’s in a white gown that shows off as much skin as it hides, a smile frozen on her face. Her eyes look tired, though. 

“Wanna dance?” That sultry voice cuts through the rest of the noise.

Wordlessly, he takes her by the hand. He wants to say so many things, but the dream has made it so he cannot speak. He supposes his subconscious is dealing out its own brand of irony for all of the times he should have spoken to her but didn’t.

She talks enough for both of them anyway. “Is your date not fun?” she asks. “I normally don’t set folks up, but when I saw her I thought she was perfect for you. She’s quiet, you’re quiet. I suppose it don’t lend itself to much scintillating conversation though. She is pretty, isn’t she? You two look real nice together.”

His fingers drift over her bare skin at the back of the gown. It’s soft and perfect to the touch.

“Johnny,” she whispers, her breath tickling his ear, and that’s the moment he wakes up.

 

He finds it strange, but this marriage of hers has freed Johnny somehow. He finds himself speaking to Ava, actually holding conversations with her about subjects from baseball to the best way to cook a steak. The only thing they don’t speak about is Bowman. They don’t have to. He’s always around, sitting with them in a booth in the bar, an arm slung around Ava’s shoulders, shooting daggers at any strangers that dare to look in her direction. Bowman never sends those looks toward his cousin. Whether it’s because they’re kin or that Bowman doesn’t see Johnny as a threat to his marriage, it’s hard to determine, and Johnny knows better than to ask.

 

He’s at a picnic one Saturday with a girl that he barely knows. She seems a little more interested in Boyd anyway, so he doesn’t feel the least bit guilty abandoning her once Ava has arrived. Ava looks different somehow and he can’t quite put his finger on it.

“You done something new with your hair?”

“No.”

“New dress?” He knows it isn’t. 

“No.”

“There’s something different about you. Lose weight?”

“No.”

“Gain weight?” he teases, but now that he looks at her, she seems to have filled out that dress he likes a little more.

She sighs and hisses under her breath, “I’m pregnant.”

He feels as though the rug has been pulled out from under him again. He maintains his composure. “Why didn’t Bowman say anything?”

“Because he doesn’t know.”

“Is it his?” Johnny tenses. If anyone else has laid a hand on her…

“’Course it’s his. I just haven’t told him yet. Probably shouldn’t have told you.”

“I won’t mention it, Ava. I promise.”

A few weeks later, he sees her again. She has a fading bruise on her cheek and a cast on her arm. 

She doesn’t mention the baby again.

 

When the news of Bowman’s death reaches him, Johnny is glad that Boyd is around. If it wasn’t up to Boyd to avenge his brother, with Bo in jail, that task would fall to Johnny. He’s not sure that he could do anything to harm her and that would put him just as much at risk from Bo Crowder’s wrath as it would Ava. His uncle is not the sort of man who would ignore a perceived betrayal, and not following through with punishing Bowman’s killer would definitely count as one.

 

He shouldn’t need to warn Raylan Givens about the Crowders going after Ava, but he’d heard rumors that the lawman had taken up with Ava – and if that isn’t worth a high inside fastball, he doesn’t know what is. He figures the best way to keep her safe, without getting directly involved would to be to place a hint to the lawman to get her out of town before Bo is released from prison.

Either Ava doesn’t listen or she’s just plain hard-headed, because he spots her car in front of the hardware store a few weeks later. Johnny takes a moment to look her over, enjoying the view, because he hopes that it’s the last he’s going to get for a while. He doesn’t want to scare her, but he needs her to know how serious this threat is. Even with Ava challenging him at every turn, he thinks he might be getting somewhere, but then Helen comes roaring in with her shotgun, threatening him, like she’s Ava’s avenging angel or something. He leaves, telling Ava to give his regards to Raylan. He hopes that the Marshal can talk some sense into her.

 

If she gets out of town, he still has a chance. Johnny imagines scenarios where Bo gets fatally stabbed before he can get out of prison, or Boyd blows himself up with that ridiculous rocket launcher that he carries around. If, somehow, the two of them are out of the picture and there’s no one left to seek revenge for Bowman’s death, he could find Ava and tell her all the things he’s been keeping in his heart since he’s known her. Maybe they’d make a difference, maybe they wouldn’t, but when all was said and done, he’d be that much closer to making his dreams a reality.


End file.
